Good scrubbin’

Oh, boy…Boingboing mentions something squid-related and everyone sends me email. Should I mention that I brought up Squid Soap back in August? (Hah! That Doctorow fellow thinks he’s so cutting edge. Poseur.) However, Craig Clarke just sent me some information on a holy cruciform-shaped scrub brush, and it seems to me that we have to get these two products together.

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+

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If you’re going to wash away the sins of the world, you ought to do it with squid soap, I think.

Party. My house. 5:30.

Y’all come on down—we’re having a party at my place tonight. Everyone bring something to eat or drink, hang about, talk, listen to some music

All you need is hate The Delgados
Black Cadillacs Modest Mouse
Viktorin Hedningarna
Lullaby The Cure
Thunder Road Bruce Springsteen
Skinfakse (Delivering The Light) Hege Rimestad
Porcelain Moby
El Prado Tom Griesgraber
Sugar Magnolia Grateful Dead
Excitable Boy Warren Zevon
Consequence Of Sounds Regina Spektor

I’m going to be so lonely tonight, aren’t I?

Carnivalia, and an open thread

Hey! Go read these! You can talk about anything you want in the comments!


The Tangled Bank

Next week’s Tangled Bank will be hosted at OK so I’m not really a cowboy. Send your links directly to indiancowboysblog-at-gmail.com, or to host@tangledbank.net, or to me. Any new volunteers to host? The next open slots are available in February and later.

I have a new favorite charity!

Check it out: The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science is an Anglo-American secular charitable organization that is in the process of being set up. They have a long list of causes they will support—science and education on the top of the list, but also many other traditional charitable goals—and all with an overt secular mission. It is a brilliant idea I can get behind, and I think it has the potential to give a visible focus to the good efforts of godless people everywhere.

No conversion for Irwin

The Christian group that spread the initial rumor that Steve Irwin had been “born again” shortly before his death has retracted the claim.

But as encouraging as it might be for Christians to know they
may share heaven with Irwin, the group now concedes there is reason
to doubt the conversion. The unverified story was sent out by an
exuberant staff member, said the group’s managing director, Carl
Wieland. “Though we are able to substantiate our suggestion that
Steve’s wife, Terri, was a church-going Christian, the stories of
Steve coming forward can, at this stage, not be substantiated,” he
said in a statement on the group’s website.

Note the name: Carl Wieland. The Australian co-founder of Answers In Genesis, the creationist group. I am not surprised.

How to dismantle a body

Don’t be too grossed out, but the University of Wisconsin Madison has put a whole series of high-quality videos of human dissection online. It’s extremely cool, but not for the squeamish—there’s more than just the sight of a cadaver getting hacked up, and the sound of a saw on bone or a chisel being used to peel up the cranium are, ummm, memorable. At least you’re spared the odor and the textures.

I’d almost forgotten how muscular gross anatomy is—it takes some heft and brute force to take apart a body.

(via Mind Hacks)

Even their engineers don’t get it

ID advocates are prone to brag about their self-professed expertise, which all too often relies on some respectable knowledge of engineering or other fields irrelevant to biology. DaveScot, the raving mad anti-scientist at Uncommon Descent, is a perfect example…but even in their own domains of knowledge they too often prove to be incompetent. Case in point: their blog has somehow become delisted from Google, and now DaveScot is flailing about, trying to find someone to blame. His answer? Wesley Elsberry did it. It’s all because other sites mirror their content, which he thinks Google finds offensive.

[Read more…]